Sunday, 12 April 2015

A report from Carol on a workshop day"This time I took the key workers out of the classroom to work on storytelling techniques. I observed each of them telling their favourite stories to their key groups. I noticed that while everyone had particular skills, the way to bring out the best in everyone would involve sharing the best of these skills across the group. I took notes about each key worker’s strengths and areas for development, and assigned them each one person to help them with a particular skill, and one person they should help in turn. I made a story sack for the book “Someone Bigger” by Jonathan Emmett and Adrian Reynolds, and used this story sack to demonstrate how they can best be used to enhance all areas of the curriculum. I asked the key workers to begin thinking about making their own story sacks in anticipation of the INSET day I’m delivering in late May."

Carol Ferro is the Short Story Lady, one of the artists working on the Stories alive! project

Photos: due to the nature of this activity we haven't

got any photos, so here are a couple of

cheerful Spring pictures to liven your eyes!

Stories Alive! has placed 5 artists in 5 Nursery Schools (see below)
in and around Burnley in East Lancashire with the challenge of developing 5
different sets of activities to help embed storytelling and storymaking in
Nursery practice, in families and in the children we are working with

The adventure began with a storywalk.
Outdoors, through bushes and play equipment, behind trees, over grass, under
climbing frames, children followed the lion, Nyan's, trail through the Rockwood
wilderness

As they met the unfolding
story, children looked for lanterns, found dragons, and a shelter for the (very
tasty-looking!) goat, listening to and playing with the story at the same time

These outdoor sessions were
great fun and well received despite increasingly soggy conditions as the day
progressed. With the rain and the excitement of going for a walk with a dragon
(and a certain degree of worry that there might be a lion about), we did wonder
how much of the story our young storytellers would remember

a heroic dragon spreading over several pages

Indoors, however, they joined
me* to tell me the story they had just adventured through and go on to draw the
story in folded-paper books. There was a powerful lesson here in seeing that
almost everyone, especially working together where children could fill in each
other's gaps, every group, even the very wettest ones, could tell the story
back to me and then go on to improvise around it in their own books.

~ our brave dragon
changed size, colour and nature

~ Nyan was usually a
lion but occasionally tigers were more frightening

~ the Goat might
remain a goat but was also occasionally a sheep, a donkey, or a rabbit.

But everyone was always sure
that red is the colour of good luck and safety and red scares the monsters
away.

Nyan's story tied in with the
beginning of the Year of the Goat (or the Sheep) and was the first of a number
of activities the children went on to do over the next few days, adding more
experiences to their Chinese New Year celebrations

even a delicate fan could scare a monster away

For Stories Alive!, it was
good to see how enthusiastically our children would both use the thread of a
story to explore the school grounds and how well they listened and remembered,
especially those the moments they had been active in, using that memory to help
rebuild the whole story around

* 2 artists involved: Hannah
Stringer, Rockwood's artist-in-residence, planned and set up the sessions while
I came in as an extra pair of hands and useful colouring pencil

(photos: more pictures are pending - waiting for a chance to check with families as to which ones we can show - they'll come in after the holidays)

Stories Alive! has placed 5 artists in 5 Nursery Schools (see below)
in and around Burnley in East Lancashire with the challenge of developing 5
different sets of activities to help embed storytelling and storymaking in
Nursery practice, in families and in the children we are working with

Both of these books took me back to personal occasions in an almost
disturbing way. Richard Kerridge's description of his childhood adventures with
amphibians could have been autobiographical for me. I still remember the almost
hysterical excitement of watching tadpoles in a pond, or in a jam jar and the
thrilling sense of connection with amphibian life. The sheer elegance of a newt
gliding suddenly out into an arena bounded by water plants and sunken wood and
hanging there, balanced in the water, still leaves me speechless

But the story of the Golden Toads of Monte Verde ran with me
through early adult life. When I was a zoology undergraduate, they were being
talked about. These frogs that looked as if they'd been cast in metal: almost
improbably vivid just sitting there on a stream bank. And then in 1989 one male was seen. The last that anyone has seen. They were gone.

Bufo taitanus - a dwarf toad!

That is the storyline that runs throughLost Frogs. Almost heartbreakingly poignant (at least for me),
is this repeated litany of the frogs (and other amphibians) found, documented -
and lost. Whole populations - and not always with small starting numbers -simply dwindling and disappearing over
the course of a year or two. Trying to understand these processes makes for a
fascinating book. There is a strong sense of how fragile (but wait for it)
amphibians are and how different factors all apparently conspire to undermine
their lifecycles, from habitat loss to variations in el Niño to the rampant
gallop of Chytrid fungus across the planet.

Bufo maculatus - a square-marked toad

Inevitably - hopefully - the story is more intricate than
that as, sometimes, just as suddenly, the frogs come back. Not all of them,
but enough to slap the face of that human arrogance that assumes that
"only we can save them". Given half a chance, those delicate frogs can
save themselves. Give them no chance at all and they still might find a way to
persist, quietly, inconspicuously, coping slowly with fungal infections,
waiting out changing water tables, just hanging on in there until it all got
better.

Kassina senegalensis - a running frog!

It's not all good news. Too many of those lost frogs have
stayed lost. Lost Frogs describes the 2010 -2011 Conservation International
project of the same name and the heroic collection of expeditions that set
offin search of their missing
amphibians. If it wasn't so poignant, it could sound like the follow up to
Michael Palin's Ripping Yarn "Over the Andes by Frog"

Chiromantis xerampelina: Great Grey Treefrogs

But it is poignant and the stories are often sad despite the
occasional triumphs and that's where Lost Frogs scores over Cold Blood
for me. They are both enthusiastic books, written by people who have real
passions for the subjects but in the end Cold Blood misses that wider context and a relevance or
engagement beyond the author's own interest. It reads for me like a writing
exercise grown into a book while Lost Frogs has a purpose and a sense of mission

Both books are worth reading especially if you're wondering
"why all this amphibian stuff? Why are they important?" but for motivation
and inspiration, Lost Frogs does it for
me

Cold Blood, Richard Kerridge, Chatto & Windus, 2014,978-0-70118-795-8

In Search of Lost Frogs, Robin Moore, Bloomsbury, 2014, 978-1408-1-8633-6

Photos: reading these books sent me off to dig out and scan
slides of my personal lost frogs: not scientifically lost but frogs from my
past. I offer various amphibians of Malawi! The names are the ones I knew them by 30 years ago. Nomenclature might have changed since!

Wednesday, 8 April 2015

Rosegrove Nursery

Tuesday 10th March 2015

Who would we take on our adventure? Who should we send on an
adventure?

We started with characters, telling instant stories and
making up on-the-spot adventures: what if? what might? O dear!

With Stories Alive! different artists are exploring different ways of
building stories with young children, and Rosegrove and I are finding ways of
improvising stories out of what we can find in the Nursery's grounds and garden

On this cheerful Tuesday, we started with small puppets: as
tall as a finger and as brave as lions and we sent them out exploring…

I have a useful set of small character drawings that we sued to get us started. These are simple figures who need faces adding and have hands waiting for bags, lunch boxes, dangerous sticks, footballs, umbrellas, binoculars....

With plates to arrange finds on, we started off asking "what
would help our hero on his or her adventure"

twigs for campfires

and throwing at monsters

and tickling trolls,

leaves for blankets

and the walls of houses,

and mud because you should always have some

pinecones are good for throwing at monsters

Looking for those first finds generally then set whole
stories in motion as children moved on from that starting point for themselves,
adding treasures, finding exciting places to go (someone drowned in the
quicksand of the sandpit where for others the dinosaurs lived) and risking
life, limb and cardboard to bravely balance on logs or climb giant jungle
bushes

These were short sessions, revolving around making our puppets,
finding useful things and talking about them. We recorded discoveries quickly
with pictures and small finds on long storyboards and groups told their stories
back to each other again before they went home

(photos: more pictures are pending - waiting for a chance to check with families as to which ones we can show - they'll come in after the holidays)

Next time:who
lives behind this door? Or that door? Or the scary one over there in the roots of the tree....

small pirates are
always useful!

Stories Alive! has placed 5 artists in 5 Nursery Schools (see below)
in and around Burnley in East Lancashire with the challenge of developing 5
different sets of activities to help embed storytelling and storymaking in
Nursery practice, in families and in the children we are working with

Tuesday, 7 April 2015

Every stone has a story to tell, a story spun out of a
million years of growing and crumbling, heating,freezing, cracking, melting and the heavy tread of dinosaur
feet, or maybe the silent weight of mammoths or even the warm, careful hands of
a cave-child

At Marsden Community Primary School in the spring of 2015, I worked
with agroup of Year 3 children to
find some of those stories and use the stones to inspire some new writing. We mixed children from both Year 3 classes and, at the school's invitation, parents joined us as well adding a lovely extra element to the atmosphere

From simply handling our stones and reading up on their uses,
our first stone-stories were poems:

In snooker tables and mirrors,

In graveyards and floors,

Safe and solid and strong,

Brown slate will even

Let us draw on the floor

Lumpy as a camel's back,

Yellow and orange and grey,

Hard and heavy as a frying pan,

Granite begins,

Hotter than chocolate,

Hotter than tea,

Hotter than fire

Hot liquid rock

Is where granite begins

We listened to an old story where a boulder in a forest
tells a single boy the first stories and he starts storytelling. We took that
story and told it back to each other. We mapped it and remembered it. Our
schools torytellers took their maps and stories home to tell their familes and
like the boy in the story (in our telling one boy became a boy and a girl), to
keep the stories spreading

We played with our words, building descriptions:

As red as a rose,

As red as blood,

As red as plums and rubies and beetroot,

As red as cherries,

As red as a volcano before it erupts

(This is actually a description of the hair that grew on Medusa's head after the animals had nibbled her snakes to freedom - but that
is another story!)

And finally we gave our stones faces, with wide-mouthed puppets that took their shapes and colours and natures from the stones they
started life as. Small, quick pebble-people-puppets provided an avalanche of backing vocals, rattling away like rockfalls. The bigger stones themselves started talking. Telling their own stories. reciting the poems of their first memories, singing, sighing, arguing
and shouting. Whispering their stories to anyone who would listen

Many thanks to Julie and the team at Marsden and

to all the puppeteers and geologist, writers,

poets and storytellers - and their parents! - at Marsden

pumice always seems to have a lot to say
- too much hot air perhaps?

Practical points:
we worked with the core group for 4 mornings spread out over 6 weeks
afternoons were spent with the rest of those classes on similar themes
materials: I brought in some of my rock, mineral and fossil sets, adding some lovely big chunks of rock to handle